March 28, 2004

Want Real Energy Independence? Bag Solar. Bag Wind. Go Nuclear.

HUBER AND MILLS at City Journal note that "our solitary New Yorker on the Upper West Side as a 1,400-watt bulb that never sleeps—that's the national per-capita average demand for electric power from homes, factories, businesses, the lot." It's going up and they cast a cold-eye on where all this new energy is going to have to come from:

We're burning our 40 quads of raw fuel to generate about 3.5 trillion kilowatt-hours of electricity per year; if the automotive plug-and-play future does unfold on schedule, we'll need as much as 7 trillion kWh per year by 2025. How should we generate the extra trillions of kilowatt-hours?

With hydrogen, the most optimistic Green visionaries reply - produced by solar cells or windmills. But it's not possible to take such proposals seriously. New York City consumes so much energy that you'd need, at a minimum, to cover two cities with solar cells to power a single city (see "How Cities Green the Planet," Winter 2000). No conceivable mix of solar and wind could come close to supplying the trillions of additional kilowatt-hours of power we'll soon need.

Nuclear power could do it -- easily. In all key technical respects, it is the antithesis of solar power. A quad's worth of solar-powered wood is a huge forest -- beautiful to behold, but bulky and heavy. Pound for pound, coal stores about twice as much heat. Oil beats coal by about twice as much again. And an ounce of enriched-uranium fuel equals about 4 tons of coal, or 15 barrels of oil. That's why minuscule quantities contained in relatively tiny reactors can power a metropolis.

What's more, North America has vast deposits of uranium ore, and scooping it up is no real challenge. Enrichment accounts for about half of the fuel's cost, and enrichment technologies keep improving. Proponents of solar and wind power maintain -- correctly -- that the underlying technologies for these energy sources keep getting cheaper, but so do those that squeeze power out of conventional fuels. The lasers coming out of the same semiconductor fabs that build solar cells could enrich uranium a thousand times more efficiently than the gaseous-diffusion processes currently used. -- City Journal Winter 2005 | Why the U.S. Needs More Nuclear Power by Peter W. Huber, Mark P. Mills

HT to David Sucher @ City Comforts who puts these authors down as "dreamers" and bemoans the fact that "these dreamers live in my world." All of which underscores that this "dream" is bound to become reality sooner rather than later.

Posted by Vanderleun at March 28, 2004 9:40 AM
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Thermal depolymerization. It's been commercial for about a year and they are getting the last kinks out of it. They are really interested in it in Europe where the mad cow disease epidemic has caused tighter regulations about feeding animal parts to animals, and the high heat of this process kills the prions, which are very hard to destroy. Here, industries with animal waste are not so eager to pay the TDP people to take it away because they can sell it for animal feed, but in Europe they can't anymore.

What i think is cool is that it solves waste disposal problems (like medical waste and plastic bottles), doesn't create waste, while producing several grades of oil, clean water, and industrial chemicals. And no need to separate the different plastics and metals, you just pour everything in one end and it fractionates out the results. And it powers itself.

Posted by: Yehudit at March 28, 2005 6:10 PM

It sounds like a great niche energy, like the wood-fueled generators in Northern California. The waste disposal aspect is attractive, since you can generate revenue at both ends of the process. BUT... what's the energy density of all that solid waste? I suspect that TDP'ing all the cow guts and Tupperware in America wouldn't give a year's worth of fuel. 300+ million Americans need a LOT of energy.

I'd jump on the solar bandwagon in a heartbeat if some photoelectric genius came up with a residential A/C unit powered only by the sunlight that hits my roof all summer. Until then, I'm with GvdL, solar is a kiddy toy.

Posted by: slimedog at March 28, 2005 10:29 PM

"I suspect that TDP'ing all the cow guts and Tupperware in America wouldn't give a year's worth of fuel. 300+ million Americans need a LOT of energy."

Read the articles, you'd be surprised. It would be a pretty big niche. What's even better is that it is scalable and doesn't use extremely advanced tech, so you could build plants of any size anywhere in the world.

Posted by: Yehudit at March 29, 2005 3:51 AM

I'm not a real fan of nuclear power, but even for those who are, I'd hope an efficiency push would be a short-term goal.

Our energy future is all about timelines. Nuclear is one of the things we can do, but the timeline is long.

I think the shortest timeline is to go buy energy efficient replacements for "stuff" we own. We can do that today.

My washing machine keeps working (even if it is getting louder), but I can replace it with one that uses half the electricity. A simple case in point.

Posted by: odograph at March 29, 2005 8:54 AM

Please enter Pebble Bed Reactor into your search engine. To me at least it looks pretty interesting. And relatively safe.

Posted by: Richard Cook at March 29, 2005 9:23 AM